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LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 



BY 



ALBERT E. PILLSBURY 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 






COPYRIGHT, I9T3, BY ALBERT K, PILLSBURY 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published September iqis 



(6) r,i A f? '*: 1 o -t K 



This brief review of Abraham Lincoln's real atti- 
tude toward Slavery and Emancipation originated 
in an address delivered at Howard University 
on the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation 
Proclamation. It is now extended by the intro- 
duction of historical evidence, principally from 
Lincoln himself, which that occasion did not 
permit. Apart from his conduct, which speaks 
for itself to those who look beneath the surface 
of it, nothing can contribute so much as his 
own words to a true understanding of this great 
American in the supreme act of his life and one 
of the monumental events in the world's history. 

Boston, September i, 1913. 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

When the conflict between Freedom 
and Slavery in this nation was ap- 
proaching its crisis, in the struggle for 
possession of the Nebraska territory, 
a new and singular figure appeared at 
the front of political battle in the West, 
moved to the head of events, passed 
across the world's stage, and in the 
short space of seven years had vanished 
from the sight of man. 

Within such narrow bounds of time 
lies a career the like of which is not 
to be found in history. In the elements 
of wonder and marvel, the story of 
Abraham Lincoln's life and death is 
without parallel or example. From the 
I 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

mean cabin in the Kentucky woods 
to the final peak of transfiguration, it 
moves in the successive acts of a great 
tragic drama, reaching the high-water 
mark of human achievement and sound- 
ing every note in the gamut of human 
emotion. 

In the scant half-century since his 
death, Abraham Lincoln has engrossed 
more of the world's attention than any 
other historic personage. Untiring re- 
search has tracked him from the cradle 
to the tomb. The remotest spot trodden 
by his foot is explored, the last relative, 
friend, or acquaintance examined for 
any word or look of the great man, 
every act of his life is studied, every 
line of his written or spoken words put 
under review, the last fragment of his 
correspondence or memoranda is drawn 

2 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

from its hiding-place or is on the way 
to be, every trait of his character, every 
mood of his mind, every feature or ex- 
pression of his face, his figure, his pose, 
his movement, is canvassed, printed, 
and eagerly read, his biographers are 
now becoming the subject of biograph}^, 
and the Lincoln literature overflows 
the libraries day by day. 

The materials now assembled tell us 
vastly more about Lincoln and his true 
relation to events than the people had 
found out in his own time. All con- 
temporary judgment of him is defective 
for want of knowledge, and there is 
much of it which history must now re- 
ject. This plain American citizen was 
one of the most complex and inscru- 
table of all the great historic characters. 
He was full of the oddest incongruities. 

3 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

By turns a man of jest and laughter 
and again " dripping," as a friend said, 
with melancholy; ranging in thought 
and speech from unquotable plainness 
to the heights of the human intellect; a 
shrewd, practical lawyer and politician 
dwelling among shadows, dreaming 
dreams, seeing portents and feeling 
mysterious influences that affected his 
conduct; the most unpretentious of 
men, set in the homeliest framework, 
thinking with the power of Plato, seeing 
with the eye of the Sibyl, speaking like 
the Hebrew prophets. The story of his 
life abounds in grotesque incident, al- 
ways of the humanest character. The 
strapping young giant of eighteen takes 
upon his back a worthless drunkard, 
perishing with cold, and totes him a 
mile to shelter. The lawyer riding the 
4 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

circuit goes back upon his trail to pull 
a hapless pig out of the mud or restore 
young birds to their nest. The official 
head of the nation, appealed to in the 
public street by a maimed soldier, sits 
down with him at the foot of the first 
convenient tree to write an order for 
his relief. The maker of an epoch 
opens his cabinet council with a chap- 
ter of Artemus Ward, and checks the 
laughter to present the Emancipation 
Proclamation. 

Yet more strange and startling are 
the dramatic shifts of scene and cir- 
cumstance that attend the unfolding 
of this unique character. The forlorn 
backwoods boy turns out to be the ap- 
pointed head of a great nation, in a 
crisis affecting the fate of the world. 
The obscure country lawyer reveals in 

5 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

a phrase what a people is waiting to 
hear, and becomes in a clay the prophet 
of the cause. The uncouth Westerner 
from the prairies, unpracticed in arms 
or in statecraft, outmasters the states- 
men, outwits the diplomatists, gives 
the generals their plan of campaign. 
The unlettered man of the people 
speaks lofty eloquence, soon to be- 
come classic. The raw politician, who 
never held public power for a day, takes 
the helm of state when the ship is 
already on the rocks, when all the 
pilots and captains stand helpless and 
appalled, to bring her in safety and tri- 
umph through the storm. The awk- 
ward clown, reviled and lampooned 
over two continents, in four years is 
canonized by mankind. Without ori- 
gin, without training, without an ex- 
6 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

ternal attraction, without a worldly 
advantage, the meanly-born child of a 
poor and shiftless emigrant makes his 
way out of the wilderness to fix for all 
time the eyes of the world as leader of 
a people, liberator of the slave, de- 
liverer of his country, and in another 
turn of the kaleidoscope, to be num- 
bered with martyrs and saints in glory 
everlasting. 

These are historical facts, but they 
dazzle the imagination and disturb the 
judgment. All through the web of this 
life are woven threads of marvel and 
mystery. People read about Lincoln 
with a weird sense of the supernatural, 
of something apart from human affairs. 
They think of another Man of Sorrows, 
and the journey from the manger to the 
cross, the crime of Cain, the translation 
7 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

of Elijah. Nothing in human biograph}; 
stirs the imagination like this. The man 
of history is already become a man of 
fable, and in some distant day learned 
doctors will dispute whether Abraham 
Lincoln was a real character or a hero 
of tradition, belonging in limbo with 
Romulus and King Arthur. 

What was this man, that he has taken 
such a marvelous hold upon the in- 
terest of the world? What was there 
in him or about him that makes us dis- 
trust our senses as we follow the steps 
of his amazing progress? Do we see 
him as he was, or do we see an image, 
an aureole, a legendary figure ? 

Abraham Lincoln is not a myth, nor 

is he like any other man. A man of 

destiny, if there is such a character in 

history, a man of many mysteries, his 

8 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

hold upon mankind is not a mystery. 
He was a new type of man — " new 
birth of our new soil," an unspoiled 
product of nature to whom all the world 
is akin. History is full of personages 
who strike the eye with great and illus- 
trious deeds. Here is one of the fore- 
most of them who stirs the heart with 
every element of human sympathy. 
More than this, he touches the uni- 
versal instinct of freedom, a chord that 
vibrates around the world. Abraham 
Lincoln is forever identified with the 
cause of human liberty. When all his 
other greatness is forgotten, history 
and legend will remember him as 
emancipator of a race and martyr of 
freedom. 

For this he is receiving, and he will 
continue to receive, the homage of the 

9 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

world. Does it belong to him? Doubts 
are cast upon his title, by indirection if 
not directly. Was Abraham Lincoln a 
moral hero, whose place is among the 
foremost of mankind, or was he a mere 
time-server, a mere Union-saver, wield- 
ing power with the cold hand of po- 
litical expediency, careless that the fate 
of a race or of freedom itself might be 
staked upon the issue, who came hesi- 
tating and reluctant to Emancipation 
and decreed the freedom of millions as 
an unavoidable move in the game of 
war? Which is the real Abraham Lin- 
coln? 

There is a belated but persisting view 
of this great character as a sort of sub- 
limated politician, concerned only with 
saving the Union, by any means at his 
command, indifferent to the national 

lO 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

crime of slavery and willing to see it 
continue if so the Union could be pre- 
served. It originated in the complaints 
of hot and impatient anti-slavery lead- 
ers before Lincoln was firm in the 
presidency, and is now taken up and 
perpetuated by all the apologists for 
slavery and rebellion. If this is a cor- 
rect estimate of his character, he never 
rose to the moral level of his own act of 
emancipation, and the exaltation of such 
a man into a world-hero is a delusion. 

A profound question of right and 
wrong underlies the rebellion and the 
events that produced it, by which the 
claim of Abraham Lincoln to the true 
title of Emancipator must finally be tried. 
We are now living in a generation that 
never saw Freedom and Slavery facing 
II 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

each other. It has become fashionable 
to divert pubHc attention from the mov- 
ing cause of a bloody war, lest the 
truth may offend some sensibilities or 
mar some reputations. We are told 
that the war, on the part of the South, 
was a patriotic if misguided attempt to 
vindicate the rights of the States, and 
on the part of the North, a war for the 
Union. In the interest of national har- 
mony we must shut the skeleton slavery 
into the closet and turn the key upon 
it, politely ignoring historical truth. A 
part of the popular perversion of history 
is to make Lincoln appear indifferent 
to slavery, and willing to save it if he 
could save the Union. So shall the 
reverence paid to his memory help to 
cover the ancient guilt and justify the 
new bondage of the oppressed race. 

12 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

What is the historical truth? From 
1820 to the downfall of the rebellion, 
every question of American politics 
turned, directly or indirectly, upon slav- 
ery. A war for vindication of state 
rights? After 1833, when the illumined 
logic of Webster and the grim front of 
Andrew Jackson had disposed of nulli- 
fication, the first fruit of the slave sys- 
tem, the right of a state to secede from 
the Union was, as Lincoln truly said, 
no longer an open or debatable ques- 
tion, and no state rights were ever in 
dispute. The right to hunt slaves in the 
free states, and to carry slavery into 
free territory, were not state rights. If 
they were rights at all, they were per- 
sonal rights of the slaveholder. A war 
for the Union? Nothing but slavery 
ever threatened the Union. The South- 
13 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

ern states did not make the war, nor the 
Southern people. They were whipped 
into it by a slaveholding oligarchy, that 
never embraced a tenth of the white 
population of the South but ruled the 
majority with an iron hand in the in- 
terest of the slave system. The war was 
a slaveholders' rebellion, treasonably 
waged against the United States for 
the single purpose of establishing upon 
this continent an independent slave- 
empire. In Lincoln's words, it was "an 
attempt, for the first time in the world, 
to construct a new nation on the basis 
of human slavery." It was a war about 
slavery, and about nothing else. It ac- 
complished the extinction of slavery, 
and it accomplished nothing else. Wit- 
ness the record, as written by the people 
in the three Amendments of the Con- 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

stitution, every line directed to secure 
the freedom of the emancipated slave. 

If slavery was a wicked system, a war 
to perpetuate it was a twice-wicked 
war. For the iniquity of slavery we 
need not rely upon preachers or moral- 
ists, or the universal opinion of all en- 
lightened men and Christian nations. 
It was openly confessed by the whole 
American people when the United 
States in 1820 joined with the other 
great powers of the world in branding 
the slave-trade as piracy and punishing 
it with death. If any distinction can be 
drawn between the guilt of the slave- 
trader, a mere incident of the system, 
and the guilt of the slaveholder, who 
constituted the system, it is not in favor 
of the slaveholder. 

If Abraham Lincoln, alive to the 

15 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

moral aspect of slavery, seized the first 
opportunity to strike it down as fatal to 
the principles of justice and liberty on 
which a restored or permanent Union 
must depend, insisting that freedom 
should be made universal for all time by 
writing it into the Federal charter, he 
was in truth the Emancipator. My pur- 
pose is to recall some of the historical 
evidences in which his true attitude to- 
ward slavery and emancipation appears. 

The contest between Freedom and 
Slavery, breaking out openly in the ad- 
mission of Missouri to the Union as a 
slave state and temporarily suppressed 
by the compromise forbidding slavery 
north of the 36-30 line, was thenceforth 
the only vital issue before the American 
people. The slave-power, aggressive 
16 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

and defiant, advanced with startling 
strides through the annexation of Texas, 
the Mexican war, the compromise-sur- 
render of 1850, the repeal of the Mis- 
souri compromise, the raid upon the 
Nebraska territory then embracing 
Kansas, and the Dred Scott manifesto 
of the Supreme Court, a decree that 
"went forth without authority and came 
back without respect," declaring the 
Federal Constitution a charter for slav- 
ery in the free territories. This course 
of events produced the Abraham Lin- 
coln of history. 

What had been the general attitude 
toward slavery of the man who issued 
the Emancipation Proclamation ? What 
did Lincoln think about slavery before 
he became a public character? 

17 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

We need not hear him say, as he often 
said, that he "always hated slavery," 
the words of a man slow to censure 
and not a man of hate. It was Abraham 
Lincoln who pronounced the completest 
judgment against slavery ever put in 
words. "If slavery is not wrong, noth- 
ing is wrong." "I cannot remember," 
he says, "when I did not so think and 
feel." 

Was it the intuition of a spirited child 
born into a system that degraded white 
poverty even more than it degraded the 
negro, or did it begin with the flatboat 
trip to New Orleans, when slavery, wit- 
ness John Hanks, "ran its iron into 
him " at the first sight of the lash and 
the auction-block ? His nearest friend 
and biographer gives credit to the story, 
curious and suggestive if true, that he 
i8 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

then and there said to his companions, 
with an imprecation that rarely issued 
from his lips, " Boys, if I ever get a 
chance to hit that thing, I '11 hit it hard." 
A forgotten lecture, produced by the 
young Lincoln in his twenties, declares 
the freeing of slaves to be one of the 
highest objects of human achievement. 
What put this into the head of the back- 
woods youth in a pro-slavery commu- 
nity? The burning of a negro by a St. 
Louis mob stirred him to one of his 
earliest speeches — on Liberty, the sub- 
ject always uppermost in his mind — a 
speech that has the added interest of 
showing that Lincoln, like Webster, 
began with a grandiloquent manner, 
imitated from the spread-eagle oratory 
of the period, before he developed his 
own inimitable style. 

19 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

If Abraham Lincoln ever uttered a 
word in extenuation of slavery, the fact 
has not appeared in history. It needs 
not his words to show how he felt to- 
ward such a system. His whole life, 
now open to the world, was an all-em- 
bracing sympathy with the oppressed 
and down-trodden that beat in every 
pulsation of his heart. To hate slavery 
was in his blood. It was a law of his 
being. 

What was Lincoln's attitude toward 
slavery as a public character and po- 
litical leader? 

The first significant public act of his 
life, in the Illinois legislature at the age 
of twenty-eight, was the recorded pro- 
test against resolutions asserting the 
'^ sacred" right of property in slaves, a 
20 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

claim which Lincoln always resented 
as profanation. The protest, so moder- 
ate that it now appears apologetic, was 
then so bold that but one colleague 
could be found to stand with him. Illi- 
nois was still pro-slavery, with a "black 
code " of unsparing severity, and but a 
few years removed from an attempt to 
make it a slave state. This was the 3^ear 
of Lovejoy's murder by the Alton mob, 
uncondemned and unpunished by Illi- 
nois, when nothing but the timely ap- 
pearance of Wendell Phillips saved 
Faneuil Hall from capture by the apolo- 
gists for that crime against humanity. 

In his single term in Congress Lin- 
coln stood with the most advanced op- 
ponents of slavery, joining in all their 
denunciations of the Mexican war, 
which he stigmatized in his "spotreso- 

21 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

lutions" then celebrated but now for- 
gotten, voting " at least forty times," as 
he said, for the Wilmot Proviso, and 
finally introducing a bill to abolish slav- 
ery in the District of Columbia. This 
measure, wrenched out of the setting 
of 1849 ^^ which it belongs, has been 
supposed to show a tenderness toward 
slavery. Moderate and guarded as it 
was, there is no doubt that Lincoln 
risked his political future in presenting 
it. As a direct step toward abolition in 
the only place where slavery existed 
within reach of Federal power, an act 
finally accomplished after many years 
only by stress of war, when it was Lin- 
coln's privilege to seal it with his offi- 
cial approval, it branded him in politics 
as an abolitionist, and many of his friends 
believed that his open hostility to slav- 
22 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

ery had sacrificed all hope of political 
advancement. 

Indeed, when Lincoln returned from 
Congress he seems to have regarded 
himself as through with public affairs. 
There are signs at this time of his tem- 
peramental depression. The revelation 
had not come to him. But the Compro- 
mise of 1850 stirred him uneasily and 
would not let him rest. He said to his 
friend Stuart, "The time will come 
when we must all be Democrats or 
Abolitionists. When that time comes, 
my mind is made up. The slavery ques- 
tion can't be compromised." This set 
him to brooding deeply upon slavery 
and its bearing upon the fate of the na- 
tion, on which it is now historic that 
he became the clearest and profoundest 
thinker of his time. It took possession 
23 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

of him. He "moused around the li- 
braries," absorbing the history of the 
institution and pondering every phase 
of the subject in long fits of silent ab- 
straction. A manuscript fragment of 
this period, of which it is said that he 
usually carried a hatful, goes to the 
roots of slavery and gives a glimpse at 
the working habit and logical precision 
of his mind: — 

"If A can prove, however conclu- 
sively, that he may of right enslave B, 
why may not B snatch the same argu- 
ment and prove equally that he may 
enslave A? You say A is white and B 
is black. It is color, then; the lighter 
having the right to enslave the darker? 
Take care. By this rule you are to be 
slave to the first man you meet with a 
fairer skin than your own. You do not 
mean color exactly? You mean the 
whites are intellectually the superiors 
24 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

of the blacks, and therefore they have 
the right to enslave them? Take care 
again. By this rule you are to be slave 
to the first man you meet with an intel- 
lect superior to your own. But, you say, 
it is a question of interest, and if you 
make it your interest, you have the right 
to enslave another. Very well. And if 
he can make it his interest, he has the 
right to enslave you." 

Lincoln's clear and direct intellect 
went straight to the question whether 
Slavery and Freedom can permanently 
dwell together in the same house. In 
this interval he read the horoscope of 
slavery, and when he began to speak 
out, it was like the voice of a prophet 
denouncing the vision. 

The threat to repeal the Missouri 
Compromise, opening to slavery the ter- 
ritory long pledged to freedom, aroused 

25 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

Lincoln once for all. From this time he 
avowed his purpose to press the assault 
against slavery to the limit of Federal 
power, "until the sun shall shine, the 
rain shall fall, the wind shall blow, upon 
no man who goes forth to unrequited 
toil." The Peoria speech of 1854, plainly 
the product of deep thought and unfold- 
ing for the first time Lincoln's matured 
mental attitude, forecasts all his later 
utterances in putting political opposi- 
tion to slavery squarely upon the moral 
ground, denouncing the iniquity of the 
system and openly declaring, as the 
final reason against it on which the bat- 
tle must turn, that slavery is wrong. It 
was the precursor of the celebrated 
"lost speech" of 1856 at Bloomington, 
and those who heard both declare that 
on each occasion he was so wrought 
26 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

up with his theme as fairly to "quiver 
with emotion." Nothing ever stirred 
Lincoln like slavery, the subject of all 
his later speeches, or moved him to 
such eloquence and depth of feeling. 
Denouncing slavery as " the only thing 
that ever endangered the Union," he 
takes the field against it at Peoria in 
utterances like these : — 

"This declared indifference but, as I 
must think, covert zeal for the spread 
of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it 
because of the monstrous injustice of 
slavery itself. I hate it because it de- 
prives our republican example of its 
just influence in the world; enables the 
enemies of free institutions with plausi- 
bility to taunt us as hypocrites; causes 
the real friends of freedom to doubt 
our sincerity; and especially because it 
forces so many really good men among 
ourselves into an open war with the 

27 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

very fundamental principles of civil 
liberty." 

"If the negro is a man, is it not to 
that extent a total destruction of self- 
government to say that he too shall not 
govern himself? When the white man 
governs himself, that is self-govern- 
ment; but when he governs himself 
and also governs another man, that is 
more than self-government — that is 
despotism. If the negro is a man, then 
my ancient faith teaches me that all 
men are created equal, and that there 
can be no moral right in one man mak- 
ing a slave of another." 

" No man is good enough to govern 
another man without that other's con- 
sent." 

"The master not only governs the 
slave without his consent, but he gov- 
erns him by a set of rules altogether dif- 
ferent from those which he prescribes 
for himself. Allow all the governed an 
28 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

equal voice in the government; that, 
and that only, is self-government." 

" Slavery is founded in the selfish- 
ness of man's nature — opposition to it, 
in his love of justice. These principles 
are an eternal antagonism; and when 
brought into collision so fiercely as 
slavery extension brings them, shocks 
and throes and convulsions must cease- 
lessly follow. Repeal the Missouri Com- 
promise — repeal all compromises — re- 
peal the Declaration of Independence 
— repeal all past history — still you 
cannot repeal human nature." 

"I particularly object to the new po- 
sition which the avowed principle of 
this Nebraska law gives to slavery in 
the body politic. I object to it because 
it assumes that there can be moral right 
in the enslaving of one man by an- 
other." 

" Little by little, but steadily as man's 
march to the grave, we have been giv- 

29 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

ing up the old for the new faith. Near 
eighty years ago we began by declar- 
ing that all men are created equal; but 
now from that beginning we have run 
down to the other declaration that for 
some men to enslave others is a ' sacred 
right of self-government.' These prin- 
ciples cannot stand together. They are 
as opposite as God and Mammon." 

"In our greedy chase to make profit 
of the negro, let us beware lest we can- 
cel and tear in pieces even the white 
man's charter of freedom. Our repub- 
lican robe is soiled and trailed in the 
dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn 
and wash it white in the spirit, if not 
the blood, of the Revolution. Let us 
turn slavery from its claims of 'moral 
right ' back upon its existing legal rights 
and its arguments of ' necessity.' " 

Three years later, in a speech at 
Springfield, he draws this picture : — 
30 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

" In those days our Declaration of 
Independence was held sacred by all, 
and thought to include all; but now, to 
aid in making the bondage of the negro 
universal and eternal, it is assailed, 
sneered at, construed, hawked at, and 
torn, till, if its framers could rise from 
their graves, they could not recognize 
it. All the powers of the earth seem 
rapidly combining against him. Mam- 
mon is after him; ambition follows; 
philosophy follows; and the theology 
of the day is fast joining the cry. They 
have him in his prison-house; they have 
searched his person and left no prying 
instrument with him. One after another, 
they have closed the heavy iron doors 
upon him; and now they have him, as 
it were, bolted in, with a lock of a hun- 
dred keys, which can never be unlocked 
without the consent of every key; the 
keys in the hands of a hundred different 
men, and they scattered to a hundred 
different and distant places; and they 



31 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

stand musing as to what invention, in 
all the dominions of mind and matter, 
can be produced to make the impossi- 
bility of his escape more complete than 
it is." 

Again, he answers to the bogey of 
"negro equality," a ghost that never 
could be laid and stalks abroad in its 
most forbidding shape after half a cen- 
tury of freedom : — 

" I protest against the counterfeit logic 
which concludes that because I do not 
want a black woman for a slave, I must 
necessarily want her for a wife." 

"All I ask for the negro is that if 
you do not like him, let him alone. If 
God gave him but little, that little let 
him enjoy." 

" I hold that there is no reason in the 

world why the negro is not entitled to 

all the natural rights enumerated in the 

Declaration of Independence, the right 

32 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- 
ness. I hold that he is as much entitled 
to these as the white man. I agree that 
he is not my equal in many respects, 
certainly not in color, perhaps not in 
moral or intellectual endowment; but 
in the right to eat the bread without the 
leave of anybody else, which his own 
hand earns, he is my equal and the equal 
of every living man." 

Lincoln, the politician, was now speak- 
ing apostolic words of freedom. Putting 
polite phrases and compromising shifts 
behind him, he brings slavery to the 
bar of political opinion as a system of 
iniquity, lifting the discussion into the 
realm of morals and making an issue 
which even a politician's conscience 
cannot evade. The struggle between 
Freedom and Slavery was now centered 
upon Douglas's Nebraska bill. As the 
33 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

most conspicuous opponent of this meas- 
ure, Lincoln took his stand upon the 
moral wrong of the slave system, and 
all the anti-slavery forces, then crystal- 
lizing into a new and powerful political 
party, had to follow and stand with 
him upon that ground. The abolition- 
ists had gone before him and done their 
work, of which Lincoln himself may 
have been a part. His bosom compan- 
ion Herndon, an ardent disciple of 
Garrison and Theodore Parker, de- 
clared that Lincoln was " baptized into 
the abolition church " on the occasion 
of the Bloomington speech. The abo- 
litionists had planted and watered, but 
it remained to gather the increase. 
They could not harvest in political con- 
ventions or in the ballot-box the crop 
which they had sown. At the oppor- 
34 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

tune moment, Lincoln appeared in the 
field and hitched the moral forces of 
abolition to the moving car of political 
events. 

Following the repeal of the Missouri 
Compromise, and while the battle was 
still raging in Kansas, came the Dred 
Scott declaration of the Supreme Court 
that the Federal Constitution forbade 
the exclusion of slavery from the free 
territories. Lincoln's acute political 
vision at once perceived that the same 
doctrine, if carried a step farther, would 
make slavery lawful in the free states. 
He challenged the attention of the coun- 
try to the new peril in that history- 
making speech now memorable and 
familiar: — 

" 'A house divided against itself can- 
35 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

not stand.' I believe this government 
cannot endure permanently half slave 
and half free. I do not expect the Union 
to be dissolved; I do not expect the 
house to fall; but I do expect it will 
cease to be divided. It will become all 
the one thing, or all the other. Either 
the opponents of slavery will arrest the 
further spread of it, and place it where 
the public mind shall rest in the belief 
that it is in the course of ultimate ex- 
tinction, or its advocates will push it 
forward till it shall become alike law- 
ful in all the states, old as well as new, 
North as well as South." 

This was the trumpet calling to bat- 
tle. Nothing like it had ever been heard 
from a recognized political leader. It 
antedated and outran Seward's " irre- 
pressible conflict," and it came from a 
man whose words were shaping the 
course of momentous political events. 

36 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

This was Lincoln's response to the 
Dred Scott declaration, and marks the 
next line of his advance. Slavery is 
irreconcilable not only with Union, but 
with freedom in the free states. If it 
goes on, it will become universal. The 
time has come when the people must 
set their house in order, by putting it in 
course of extinction. The words mean 
nothing less than this, and the bold and 
startling figure drove the meaning home. 
In this speech Lincoln fairly put slav- 
ery on the defensive before the political 
power of the nation. With a full sense 
of its importance, he had consulted his 
friends, who warned him against a dec- 
laration so radical as to invite defeat. 
To this Lincoln replied, "with strong 
emotion," as we are told, "The time 
has come when this should be said. If 

37 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

I must go down, let me go down linked 
to the truth. This nation cannot live on 
injustice." To the reproaches that fol- 
lowed the speech he rejoined, " If I had 
to draw pen across my whole record 
leaving one thing unerased, it should 
be that speech. You will live to regard 
it as the wisest thing I ever said." 

It is recorded that to those about 
him Lincoln was now as one inspired. 
"Sometimes," he says, "I seem to see 
the end of slavery. I feel that the time 
is soon coming. How it will come, 
when it will come, by whom it will 
come, I cannot tell, but that time will 
surely come." 

The debate with Douglas followed, 
now classic in history and literature. 
Was it chance or destiny that gave Lin- 

38 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

coin this opportunity ? The influence of 
Douglas upon Lincoln's career is a curi- 
ous episode in a life full of strange events. 
Rivals in their early years at the bar, 
rivals for the hand of a woman, rivals 
in politics, and finally for the highest 
political distinction, the revelation of 
Abraham Lincoln to the country was 
outwardly due to the circumstance that 
his home was the home of Douglas. As 
leader of the pro-slavery forces, author 
and principal exponent of the Nebraska 
bill, now engaged in a " squabble," as 
Lincoln called it, with the titular head 
of his party, and struggling to keep his 
hold on Illinois and his place in the 
Senate, Douglas held the center of the 
political stage, in the fiercest light of 
publicity. In this reflected light Lin- 
coln first became visible to the nation, 
39 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

as the only champion fit to enter the 
lists against the most adroit, audacious, 
and resourceful of all the protagonists 
of slavery. After the great debate is 
over, and after Douglas has gone down 
in "the battle of i860," a whimsical fate 
makes him reappear on the inaugural 
platform at the Capitol, to publicly em- 
phasize his position as a Union man, 
where he takes upon himself the modest 
office of holding Lincoln's hat while 
that lifelong adversary is crowned with 
the republican diadem. 

Nothing in the annals of our political 
forum but the meeting of Webster with 
Hayne and Calhoun can be compared, 
in the magnitude of its consequences, to 
the contest of 1858. Douglas meant to 
make his quarrel with Buchanan win 
the battle for him, by dividing the anti- 
40 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

Nebraska men. In this he would have 
succeeded against any opponent less 
wary and resolute than Lincoln, who 
held him, with a grip that never re- 
laxed, to the moral issue of the right or 
wrong of slavery. Here Douglas was 
fatally weak and foredoomed to ulti- 
mate defeat. In an unguarded moment 
he had dropped the remark that he did 
not " care whether slavery is voted up 
or voted down." The fatal persistence 
with which he was held to this unhapp}^ 
admission is a striking example of Lin- 
coln's skill and sagacity in managing 
an argument or a cause. In the historic 
question put to Douglas at Freeport, 
whether the people of a territory can 
in any lawful way exclude slavery, Lin- 
coln again displayed the foresight and 
courage of a great leader. Said his 

41 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

friends, "If you put that question to 
Douglas, he will beat you and win the 
senatorship," to which Lincoln quietly 
rejoined, "I am hunting larger game. 
If he answers the question he can never 
be president, and the battle of i860 is 
worth a hundred of this." He had to 
answer yes, or lose Illinois, and "of that 
answer," as Herndon said, "Douglas 
instantly died." Under the compelling 
hand of the master politician, he had 
flung away the South and rent the party 
of slavery in twain. 

Among Lincoln's gifts none, perhaps, 
is more remarkable than his power of 
forecasting the future. Did he already 
see the destiny that was opening before 
him? The significance of this answer 
to his friends is almost unmistakable. 
Did he already see the slave-power 
42 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

disintegrated and broken, the champion 
of freedom in this debate at the head of 
the party of freedom in "the battle of 
i860," and prevailing victorious over a 
divided enemy? This is not incapable 
of belief, but he made no sign. It turned 
out to be the course of history. When 
the contest of 1858 was over, Lincoln 
had lost the senatorship to Douglas 
and Douglas had lost the presidency to 
Lincoln, who had bagged the " larger 
game " and won the mighty opportunity 
of reconsecrating the Union to free- 
dom. 

Rarely has oratory raised a more 
striking monument to its own power 
than in the utterances of Lincoln, made 
without a thought of oratorical effect, 
from the political stump. Before the 

43 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

encounter with Douglas, he was a man 
untried, and beyond the bounds of a 
single state, almost unknown. In two 
years, a dozen speeches had put him at 
the head of the nation. There were 
qualities in Lincoln's words, public or 
private, that made him unforgettable. 
His lips dropped apologues and apo- 
thegms. He would put an argument 
into a barbed arrow of speech that went 
straight to its mark and stuck there. His 
remorseless logic could " snake a soph- 
ism out of its hole," as John Hay said, 
with a deadly certainty of which no other 
political leader of his time was capable. 
Take from the speeches against the ex- 
tension of slavery a single example of apt 
and biting illustration that forecloses 
all debate: — 

"If I saw a venomous snake crawling 
44 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

in the road, any man would say I might 
seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if 
I found that snake in bed with my chil- 
dren, that would be another question. 
I might hurt the children more than 
the snake. Much more, if I found it in 
bed with my neighbor's children, and I 
had bound myself by a solemn compact 
not to meddle with his children under 
any circumstances. But if there was a 
bed newly made up, to which the chil- 
dren were to be taken, and it was pro- 
posed to take a batch of snakes and put 
them there with the children, I take it 
no man would say there was any ques- 
tion how I ought to decide." 

He demolished the whole argument 
of Douglas in a couple of sententious 
phrases that could not be answered or 
dislodged from the public mind. "Pop- 
ular sovereignty," he said, "means that 
if one man chooses to make a slave of 
another man, neither that man nor any 
45 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

other man shall have a right to object." 
When he had forced from Douglas the 
opinion, in the face of the Dred Scott 
case, that slavery could be excluded 
from the territories, he summed up the 
position in a dozen words that made 
further protestation a vain beating of 
the air. "Douglas holds that slavery 
may lawfully be driven away from a 
place where it has a lawful right to 
stay." 

Yet no arts of speech or genius for 
debate could have given Lincoln his 
primacy, or his hold upon the people, 
without the moral power and depth of 
conviction revealed in the lofty utter- 
ances to which he often rose, as in the 
letter to the Boston men on JefTerson's 
birthday : — 

"He who would be no slave must 

46 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

consent to have no slave. Those who 
deny freedom to others deserve it not 
for themselves, and under a just God, 
cannot long: retain it." 



'to 



What was Lincoln's attitude and pur- 
pose toward slavery as he approached 
the presidency? 

This was a question of deep interest 
to the political leaders, as they saw this 
untried man about to assume the exec- 
utive power of the nation. The best 
source of authentic information was 
Herndon, Lincoln's law-partner, him- 
self a remarkable character and closer 
to Lincoln for many years than any 
other. To the inquiries of a Massachu- 
setts senator, Herndon responded with 
this portrait, now of historic fidelity: — 

"Lincoln is a man of heart, — aye, 
as gentle as a woman's and as tender, — 

47 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

but he has a will strong as iron. He 
loves all mankind, hates slavery and 
every form of despotism. Put these to- 
gether — love for the slave, and a de- 
termination, a will, that justice, strong 
and unyielding, shall be done when 
he has the right to act, and you can 
form your own conclusion. Lincoln will 
fail here, namely, if a question of po- 
litical economy — if any question comes 
up which is doubtful, questionable, 
which no man can demonstrate, then 
his friends can rule him; but when on 
Justice, Right, Liberty, the Government, 
the Constitution, and the Union, then 
you may all stand aside: he will rule 
then, and no man can move him — no 
set of men can do it. This is Lincoln, 
and you mark my prediction." 

On his journey to the Capital, Lin- 
coln said to the people of Philadelphia 
at Independence Hall: — 

"I have never had a feeling politically 

48 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

that did not spring from the truths em- 
bodied in the Declaration of Independ- 
ence, which gave Hberty not alone to 
this country but to the world in all 
future time. If the country cannot be 
saved without giving up that principle, 
I would rather be assassinated on the 
spot than surrender it." 

These words, of wide currency and 
often misquoted or misunderstood, are 
of significance enough to be recalled in 
their true meaning. It was not the com- 
mon bathos, of which Lincoln was in- 
capable, that he would forfeit his life to 
save the country. He would be assassi- 
nated rather than to save the country by 
surrendering the principle of liberty. 

No more appalling vista ever met the 
eye of ruler or statesman than opened 
before Abraham Lincoln when he en- 

49 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

tered upon the presidency. As he feel- 
ingly said, ^'Without a name, perhaps 
without a reason why I should have a 
name, there has fallen upon me a task 
such as did not rest even upon the 
Father of his Country." He found the 
government crumbling under his feet. 
The South was already in arms, and 
seven states had repudiated their alle- 
giance to the Union. In his own words 
of prophecy, soon fulfilled. Freedom 
and Slavery could no longer dwell to- 
gether, and the house divided against 
itself was reeling upon its foundations. 
In this hour of supreme trial did Abra- 
ham Lincoln forget that slavery was 
wrecking the Union which he was now 
solemnly sworn to preserve ? 

As well might he forget the earth on 
which he trod. He knew that behind 
50 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

the mask of rebellion was no face but 
that of the slave-power. His conviction 
was proclaimed and known that slavery 
and the Union could not survive to- 
gether, and it was now his charge to 
save the Union. He saw the approach- 
ing doom of slavery as a sacrifice to the 
Union. In the interval after his election, 
while a panic-stricken Congress was on 
its knees before Secession and the peo- 
ple were little better, he had been urg- 
ing influential leaders to "hold firm as 
a chain of steel " against further com- 
promise with slavery. "Have none of 
it," he says. "The tug has to come, 
and better now than later." He insisted 
that no foot of free soil should be 
thrown as a sop to the slave-power. 
" On this," he said, " I am inflexible." 
He rejected the imputation that he 

SI 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

should be thought " willing to barter 
away the moral principle involved in 
this contest for the commercial gain of 
a new submission to the South." Fore- 
seeing that the menace of war would 
invite or impel the giving of new bonds 
to slavery, he privately put into the 
hands of friends in Congress a series 
of proposals designed to forestall the 
movement, by preventing any new and 
substantial concessions. There is little 
doubt that his influence, if not his hand, 
appears in the constitutional amend- 
ment adopted by Congress on the eve 
of his inauguration, an historical frag- 
ment which disappeared in the tumult 
of war and is now forgotten. For the 
credit of the nation, this deserves to be 
remembered for what it does not con- 
tain. Of all the invitations to peace, this 
52 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

is the most inconsequential. It was de- 
signed to write into the Constitution 
the accepted dogma that Federal power 
cannot molest slavery within the states 
where it already exists, and to do no 
more. The Dred Scott doctrine is nei- 
ther adopted nor recognized, Congress 
is left as free as it was before to forbid 
slavery in the territories, suppress the 
interstate slave-trade or repeal the fu- 
gitive-slave law, and the same power 
that makes the amendment can unmake 
it in the future. There is recently dis- 
closed evidence, from his own hand, 
confirming the belief that Lincoln's un- 
seen interference at this stage was a 
large, perhaps decisive, factor in sav- 
ins the nation from the ignominy of the 
Crittenden compromise or other surren- 
der to the slave-power. By the aid of his 
53 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

influence this was averted and slavery 
held at bay to meet the chances of war. 

The clue to Lincoln's course toward 
slavery as president is long open, and 
there is no higher proof of his wisdom 
or courage. He had now exchanged 
the freedom of political debate for the 
responsibilities of power and constitu- 
tutional obligation. He was acting a 
mighty part in the face of the world. 
Every word must be weighed and every 
act deliberated. He had to move with 
caution where a single misstep might 
be fatal. He had to temporize, and there 
were occasions when he had to dis- 
semble. Appearing weakest where he 
was really greatest, he was misunder- 
stood, and the error persists in the 
face of history. 

54 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

He realized in the beginning that all 
must depend upon a united North. The 
loyal states were honeycombed with 
the timid or craven and the open sym- 
pathizers with rebellion. So conspicu- 
ous a personage as Franklin Pierce had 
written the rebel leader that blood would 
flow in our own streets at any attempt 
to coerce the South. The president must 
steer a course which all the loyal peo- 
ple would follow, or the cause was 
hopeless. What might appear like weak- 
ness under other conditions was now 
imperative necessity. He could lead 
only while appearing to follow. In- 
flexible adherence to this course com- 
pelled him to do or forbear much that 
provoked hostile criticism from the ex- 
tremists of all views. Denounced on 
the one hand as afraid to strike at slav- 
55 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

ery, and on the other as waging an abo- 
lition war, he had to keep the peace 
with Union men of all shades of opin- 
ion, that they might be held together 
in support of the cause. He had quali- 
ties that were equal to the task. The 
anti-slavery radicals scourged him with 
whips and the pro-slavery party with 
scorpions, and he submitted in silence 
and without complaint, serenely confi- 
dent in his purpose. He had a divine 
gift of patience, a "saving common 
sense" that moved by one step at a 
time, and a courage that could resist 
his own impulses no less than the cla- 
mor of factions. With supreme self- 
control, and a wisdom that seems in- 
spired, he kept his own counsel and 
awaited his time. 

All this is now familiar history. 

56 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

There is no point in his career where 
Lincoln's genius as a leader of men 
rises higher or marks him more unmis- 
takably as the man of the crisis, and 
through all this period there is no evi- 
dence that his hand was ever stayed by 
indecision or infirmity of purpose. He 
was moving steadily, in his own way, 
to the extinction of slavery. 

From the first note he struck, in his 
inaugural address, he was misunder- 
stood because he was not compre- 
hended. The radical anti-slavery leaders 
thought they saw a disposition to further 
compromise, the men of fighting blood 
a want of courage or resolution. They 
did not know the man. The address was 
essentially a piece of political strategy, 
of the highest order, in which Lincoln 
57 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

met the occasion with the far-sighted 
wisdom that was peculiarly his own. 
He could not but foresee that his appeal 
for peace was addressed to deaf ears 
and would be rejected. His principal 
task that day was to put the cause of 
the Union in the right and Secession in 
the wrong, before the country and the 
world, at the threshold of the impend- 
ing conflict, and this he did, with the 
hand of the master. 

Of the two mighty problems that 
confronted Lincoln in dealing with the 
rebellion, the military and the political, 
the latter was more complicated and 
delicate if not more difficult, and of this 
the slavery question was principally a 
part. Under strict official responsibil- 
ity he had to feel his way through a 

58 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

maze of constitutional doubts aild dis- 
putes so complex that it was never un- 
raveled. He would have been politically 
justified in leaving slavery to the course 
and chance of events. As president, he 
had no civil power over it. As com- 
mander-in-chief of the armed forces, he 
could lay hands upon it only as a neces- 
sary act of war if emancipation should 
become essential to military success. 
His right to interfere with slavery at 
all was challenged and disputed. So 
pronounced an anti-slavery man as 
Seward, the head of his cabinet, was 
afraid of it, and advised him to leave it 
alone. He was loudly warned from the 
North to leave it alone. Lincoln neither 
hesitated nor delayed. No sooner were 
the necessary military operations on foot 
than he began to formulate plans to- 

S9 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

ward the extinction of slavery. In the 
District of Columbia, within the con- 
trol of Congress, the way was plain. 
Far more important than this were the 
border slave states, wavering between 
loyalty and treason but still remaining 
in the Union. That it was vitally neces- 
sary to keep them there Lincoln be- 
lieved and all men agreed. They were 
no less devoted to slavery, as the event 
proved, than the states already in rebel- 
lion. Nevertheless, Lincoln proceeded 
to urge upon them a scheme of com- 
pensated abolition, which he never for- 
bore while any hope of success remained, 
pleading with them like a father with 
his children, with many significant in- 
timations that compulsory emancipation 
might be the consequence of refusal. 
It was to no purpose. Their attachment 
60 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

to slavery was so strong that they would 
not give it up. In April, 1862, this 
measure was indorsed by Congress, but 
events were then moving too swiftly 
and compensated abolition was left be- 
hind. 

Written history has strangely missed 
the true significance of this episode. 
Anxious as Lincoln was to hold the 
allegiance of the border states, why 
should he go aside to press upon them 
an unpalatable scheme of abolition, at 
the risk of stimulating their natural 
sympathy with the other slave states to 
a degree that might imperil their ad- 
herence to the Union? 

The question admits of but one an- 
swer. Profoundly convinced that slav- 
ery and the Union could not survive 
together, Lincoln realized from the be- 
61 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

ginning that the extinction of slavery 
was as necessary to a restored Union 
as the winning of battles. His appeal 
to the border states, charged against 
him as temporizing with slavery, is the 
first open and unmistakable evidence of 
his purpose to make an end of it. He 
began in the localities where it could 
be reached by peaceful means, clearly 
within his power. To treat with these 
states for voluntary abolition would not 
divide or imperil the North. If he suc- 
ceeded, he would divide the South, ex- 
tinguish slavery in a third of its domain, 
and fatally undermine the whole sys- 
tem. If he failed, the failure would go 
to justify compulsory emancipation. 
This is the indisputable meaning of his 
conduct, confirmed, as we shall see, by 
the testimony of his own words. 
62 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

Lincoln's interference with military 
commanders in dealing with escaped 
slaves, his "revocation," as it is still 
called, of Fremont's proclamation of Au- 
gust 30, 1861, the recalling of Cameron's 
report of December, i86i,on the arming 
of the black refugees, and the annulling 
of Hunter's order of May, 1862, brought 
upon him a storm of hostile criticism. 
In each case he took the only proper 
course, for which he had the unanswer- 
able reasons. The military power over 
slavery was still in dispute, the military 
necessity on which it must stand was 
not established, — and this Lincoln after- 
ward declared to be his principal reason 
for delay, — the people were not yet pre- 
pared for emancipation, as the event 
proved, and a subject involving such 
vast political consequences belonged to 

63 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

the head of the government and not to 
generals in the field. There must be 
one uniform policy, for the army and 
the country. He did not revoke Fre- 
mont's proclamation, but modified it to 
conform to the Confiscation Act. In re- 
voking Hunter's order he pointedly 
declares that he "reserves to himself" 
the question of military emancipation, 
and here again he appeals to the border 
states to abolish slavery under the Com- 
pensation Act, with a direct admoni- 
tion to heed "the signs of the times." 
He warned Congress and the country 
in his message of December, 1861, and 
elsewhere, in words of unmistakable 
import, that "all indispensable means" 
must be employed to preserve the Union. 
In the light of what followed, it is plain that 
he was pointing toward emancipation. 

64 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

For all his shortcomings, as they 
were regarded, and especially for his 
delay in striking at slavery with the 
sword of military power, the impatient 
but undiscerning radicals poured out 
the vials of their wrath upon him, and 
multiplied the troubles to which only 
infinite patience could submit. His acts 
and omissions were public. As every 
word he spoke was heard by the enemy, 
North and South, his motives and pur- 
poses could not be disclosed. Conduct 
born of a wisdom superior to their own 
was ascribed to reluctance or irresolu- 
tion by a people who had not found 
him out. He told the cabinet one day 
a story of a man who always pretended 
to be insane when beset by his cred- 
itors, and significantly said, " On more 
than one occasion I have been com- 
6s 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

pelled to appear mad." It is one of the 
oddities of this singular career that the 
only scar borne upon the person of 
the Emancipator was at the hand of a 
negro and the only lasting impeachment 
of his character the work of the most 
zealous opponents of slavery. 

The impatient temper of Horace 
Greeley could not await the cautious 
but sure-footed steps of the great presi- 
dent toward the freeing of the slaves. 
His "Prayer of Twenty Millions," in 
the Tribune, drew from the president 
a public reply, under date of August 
22, 1862, in which appears the much- 
quoted, misunderstood, and perverted 
declaration, " If I could save the Union 
without freeing any slave, I would do 
it." Of all the supposed evidences of 
66 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

Lincoln's willingness to save slavery, 
this is the most persistent, and in the 
light of events, the least significant. If 
it ever afforded any justification for 
such a view of Lincoln, it was but for 
a day. 

It has long been known that Lin- 
coln's purpose of emancipation became 
a fixed resolve not later than July, 
1862. As early as June 18 he had 
privately read to the vice-president 
what is supposed to have been the first 
sketch of the Proclamation, and about 
the same time this was shown to an- 
other confidential friend. On the vessel 
returning from Hampton Roads, July 
10, he was at work upon this or another 
draft. Two days later he urged his last 
appeal upon the border-state men to 
abolish slavery with compensation, but 

67 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

in vain. The situation was now vastly 
different from that of the previous year. 
In the lurid light of war, the dullest eye 
was beginning to see that slavery was 
the backbone of the rebellion. Every 
soldier's grave was a new testimony 
against it. The swift movement of events 
furnished proof that the public feeling 
against slavery had risen from day to 
day. In one of the early speeches Lin- 
coln had prefigured the peaceful ex- 
tinction of slavery as the task, perhaps, 
of a hundred years, but now a year of 
war had done the work of a century. 
In this interval the black republics of 
Hayti and Liberia were recognized, a 
treaty concluded with Great Britain for 
effectual suppression of the slave trade 
— which Seward declared to be "the 
great act of this administration" — Con- 
68 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

gress had abolished slavery in the Dis- 
trict of Columbia, excluded it from the 
territories in the face of the Dred Scott 
doctrine, thus finally disposed of, prac- 
tically annulled the fugitive-slave law 
and superseded the unwieldy Confisca- 
tion Act of 1 86 1 by declaring escaped 
slaves free as captives of war and eligi- 
ble for military service. The popular 
approval of these measures seemed to 
warrant the president in believing that 
the people would now accept a general 
emancipation. McClellan warned him 
that an abolition policy would disinte- 
grate the armies in the field, but he 
passed this admonition without notice. 
On July 13 he privately disclosed to 
Seward and Welles his purpose to de- 
cree emancipation. To the assembled 
cabinet, on July 22, he presented the pre- 
69 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

liminary proclamation, declaring that 
he did not seek their advice upon eman- 
cipation, as he was resolved upon it, 
but only suggestions of form or detail. 
Evidently he was prepared to issue the 
proclamation at once. The cabinet fa- 
vored Seward's suggestion to wait for a 
military success, when the edict might 
go out upon a wave of popular enthu- 
siasm. The president concurred, and 
this delayed its issue until the repulse 
of Lee at Antietam. 

The truth, then, is that at the mo- 
ment when Lincoln penned the letter 
to Greeley, August 22, he was with- 
holding, in deference to his advisers, 
the settled decree of emancipation, wait- 
ing only for the wings of victory on 
which a month later it went forth to 
the world. 

70 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

Remarkable as Lincoln was for tak- 
ing the people into his confidence when 
he could, he was always able, through 
good and evil report, to keep his own 
counsel when he must. Later than the 
Greeley letter, and but a week before 
the proclamation appeared, a delega- 
tion of clergymen came to urge imme- 
diate emancipation. He submitted to 
their reproaches, giving no hint of the 
true situation, and indeed suggesting 
obstacles in the way of their desire. 
The disappointed friends of freedom 
returned home to meet the proclama- 
tion in the newspapers. 

Those who point to the Greeley let- 
ter, or other fancied evidences that 
Lincoln was willing to save slavery, 
are ignorant of the historical facts or 
too little to comprehend them. The 
71 



^ 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

letter is but another proof of Lincoln's 
genius for managing men and events. 
Already resolved upon emancipation, 
for which he must have the people with 
him, he seized the occasion of Gree- 
ley's protest to make a public declara- 
tion which would help to disarm the 
conservatives of the North against the 
policy of freedom which he was about 
to proclaim, as he had disarmed the 
border states against it by the offer of 
compensation. It was pure hypothesis 
to say that he would save the Union if 
he could without freeing a slave. With 
equal truth, and as little significance, he 
migfht have said that he would save the 
Union if he could without sacrificing a 
man in battle. Thousands of slaves were 
already freed, by course of war, as thou- 
sands of men were fallen in the field. 
72 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

We know that Lincoln realized from 
the beginning the futility of trying to 
save the Union with slavery, and he 
knew, when he wrote the Greeley let- 
ter, that he was about to proclaim eman- 
cipation. In the light of these facts, 
the letter can bear no other meaning 
than that which obviously it bore to 
Lincoln himself. In the letter to Robin- 
son, of August, 1864, he says: — 

" It is true, as you remind me, that in 
the Greeley letter of 1862 I said: ' If I 
could save the Union without freeing 
any slave, I would do it.'jf. . . I con- 
tinued in the same letter: ^What I do 
about slavery and the colored race I do 
because I believe it helps to save the 
Union; and what I forbear, I forbear 
because I do not believe it would help 
to save the Union. I shall do less when- 
ever I shall believe what I am doing 
hurts the cause; and I shall do more 
73 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

whenever I shall believe doing more 
will help the cause.' . . . When I after- 
ward proclaimed emancipation and em- 
ployed colored soldiers, I only followed 
the declaration just quoted from the 
Greeley letter that ' I shall do more 
whenever I shall believe doing more 
will help the cause.!" 



Pending the final act of emancipa- 
tion, the president submitted to Con- 
gress a plan of constitutional abolition, 
immediately securing the freedom of 
all slaves emancipated by the events of 
war, and authorizing a national sub- 
sidy, with compensation to loyal own- 
ers, upon voluntary abolition by the 
states. "Without slavery the rebellion 
could never have existed — without 
slavery it could not continue." This is 
the text of a full discussion of the sub- 
74 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

ject " in its economical aspect," rising 
at the close to these words of eloquent 
entreaty: — 

"The fiery trial through which we 
pass will light us down, in honor or 
dishonor, to the latest generation. We 
say we are for the Union. The world 
will not forget that we say this. We 
know how to save the Union. The 
world knows that we know how to save 
it. We — even we here — hold the 
power and bear the responsibility. In 
giving freedom to the slave we assure 
freedom to the free — honorable alike 
in what we give and what we preserve. 
We shall nobly save or meanly lose the 
last best hope of earth. Other means 
may succeed; this could not fail. The 
way is plain, peaceful, generous, just — 
a way which, if followed, the world will 
forever applaud and God must forever 
bless." 



75 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

Lincoln already saw what his im- 
patient critics had not yet perceived, 
that the extinction of slavery could be 
made final and complete only by writ- 
ing it into the Federal Constitution. 
The Proclamation would free the slaves 
to the extent of military power, but it 
could not make slavery unlawful in a 
single state. To accomplish this end, 
and possibly hasten the return of peace, 
he would subsidize voluntary abolition, 
and temper the blow to slaveholders 
who adhered to the Union. But popular 
excitement, fed by the preliminary proc- 
lamation, was now running too high for 
this. Nothing followed from his appeal 
but fresh denunciation of the compensa- 
tion scheme, by fiery spirits who would 
risk the freedom of the slave rather than 
pay ransom for his deliverance. 

76 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

At the day appointed for the final 
act, the president was ready. It was not 
an auspicious time. The proclamation 
of September, welcomed with shouts 
of acclaim by the abolitionists and by 
some of the enfranchised race, was so 
coldly received by the country that the 
great states had'turned against the presi- 
dent in the ensuing elections. It was 
yet doubtful whether the people were 
equal to the policy of freedom, and our 
arms were now under the shadow of a 
bloody defeat. Clouds and darkness 
were before him, but the die was cast 
and Lincoln could not hesitate. The 
final decree went forth in the Emanci- 
pation Proclamation of January i, 1863, 
making the day forever illustrious in 
the annals of mankind. The new birth 
of the American nation into real free- 
77 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

dom marked the final disappearance 
of chattel slavery from the Christian 
world. 

Whatever were the limitations upon 
the legal operation or effect of the 
proclamation, Lincoln believed it to be, 
as history has pronounced it, the death- 
blow of slavery. From this time he 
stood to it firmly as an act accomplished, 
making its full observance a condition 
of every future step toward peace. 
Throughout the critical years of battle 
that followed, he rejected with indig- 
nant scorn all intimations that slavery 
might yet be rehabilitated. " There have 
been men base enough," he said, "to 
propose to me to return to slavery our 
black warriors of Port Hudson and 
Olustee. Should I do so, I should de- 
serve to be damned in time and eternity." 

78 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

When the question of his renomination 
came on, he characteristically said, "It 
won't make much difference who is 
president if pledged to emancipation 
and negro soldiers." The appalling 
slaughter of the 1864 campaigns brought 
on a peace movement, with intimations 
that slavery might be restored, upon 
which the president, then reelected for 
a second term, shuts the book in his last 
message to Congress with these de- 
cisive words: — 

"I repeat the declaration made a 
year ago, that while I remain in my 
present position I shall not attempt to 
retract or modify the Emancipation 
Proclamation, nor shall I return to slav- 
ery any person who is free by the terms 
of that proclamation or by any of the 
Acts of Congress. If the people should, 
by whatever mode or means, make it 

79 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

an executive duty to reenslave such 
persons, another, and not I, must be 
their instrument to perform it." 

In the letter to Hodges, of April, 
1864, an historical document of the first 
importance, Lincoln has left a record 
of the mental process by which he 
reached emancipation. He always felt 
the wrong of slavery, he says, but — 

" I understood that in ordinary civil 
administration my oath forbade me to 
practically indulge my primary abstract 
judgment on the moral question of 
slavery. . . . And I aver that to this 
day I have done no official act in mere 
deference to my abstract judgment and 
feeling on slavery. I did understand, 
however, that my oath to preserve the 
Constitution imposed upon me the duty 
to preserve, by every indispensable 
means, that government, that nation, of 

80 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

which the Constitution was the organic 
law. ... I felt that measures other- 
wise unconstitutional might become 
lawful by becoming indispensable to 
the preservation of the Constitution 
through the preservation of the nation. 
Right or wrong, I assumed this ground 
and now avow it. . . . When in March 
and May and July, 1862, I made earnest 
and successive appeals to the border 
states to favor compensated emancipa- 
pation, I believed the indispensable ne- 
cessity for military emancipation and 
arming the blacks would come unless 
averted by that measure. ... In tell- 
ing this tale I attempt no compli- 
ment to my own sagacity. I claim not 
to have controlled events, but con- 
fess plainly that events have controlled 
me." 

There is some of Lincoln's character- 
istic self-effacement in this, but the 
meaning is plain. If it adds little to 
81 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

what a discerning eye can read from 
the course of his conduct, it is his own 
testimony. Restrained by imperative 
official obligations, he is still looking 
for ground on which to stand in over- 
throwing slavery. Indispensable mili- 
tary necessity is such a ground. With- 
out waiting for military necessity, he 
tries to begin the process of extermina- 
tion by negotiating for voluntary aboli- 
tion in the border states. When this 
attempt fails, he accepts the result as 
establishing military necessity, and is- 
sues the Proclamation. 

The military necessity was strenu- 
ously denied at the time. Indeed, a 
numerous party maintained to the end 
that the whole proceeding was an un- 
warranted and unlawful usurpation of 
power. As a purely military question, 
82 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

it probably must be conceded that no 
compelling military necessity for eman- 
cipation was then, if it was ever, estab- 
lished. Upon the degree of necessity 
Lincoln had the right to exercise his 
own judgment, and he cast it in favor 
of liberty. If he was controlled by 
events, they were events which his own 
hand had helped to set in motion. 

The germ of the Emancipation Proc- 
lamation was in the " divided house " 
speech of 1858. That bold and startling 
utterance had a far-reaching influence 
upon Lincoln's career, and upon the 
course of history. If the slave-power had 
any pretext for secession or the appeal 
to arms in 1 861, it was that Lincoln, as 
a political leader, had changed the front 
of the victorious party toward slavery 

83 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

from passive toleration to open hostility, 
and put the North in an attitude that 
not only made any further extension of 
slavery impossible, but fairly endan- 
gered its permanent existence in the 
states. Seeing the full import of the 
Dred Scott doctrine if accepted as a rule 
of political action, Lincoln had warned 
the people, with prophetic insight and 
solemnity, that the nation must become 
all slave or all free. The warning went 
home, and the people had called the 
prophet to the chair of state. The slave- 
power read the omen, and saw with the 
swift instinct of self-preservation, what 
Lincoln himself must have anticipated, 
that the seed now sown would bear fruit 
of an irresistible political movement, in 
some form, toward the extinction of 
slavery. The system was now besieged 

84 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

in its own house. There might have 
been a capitulation on terms that would 
not involve bloodshed or ruin, but the 
slave-power threw away its opportunity. 
Under the Constitution, the peaceful 
extinction of slavery could be accom- 
plished only by shutting it up in the 
states and leaving it to a lingering death 
by natural decay, hastened, perhaps, by 
suppression of the interstate slave-trade 
and repeal of the fugitive-slave law, 
or by persuading the South to accept 
compensated abolition. The slave- 
power, blind with passion, did not see 
that armed rebellion would put in Lin- 
coln's hand the sword by which slavery 
could be destroyed at one stroke as a 
necessary act of war. And so it was 
done. 



8s 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

By Lincoln's procurement, the Thir- 
teenth Amendment was made the fea- 
ture of the party convention and plat- 
form of 1864. Under this impetus, and 
the urgent appeal of his last message to 
Congress, it finally passed that body 
January 31, 1865. It is known that he 
exhausted his personal influence, and he 
was charged with straining his oflicial 
power, to insure its success. There is 
some authority for the story, not inca- 
pable of belief, that when the Amend- 
ment was stalled in the House, the pres- 
ident sent for a friendly leader and 
said to him, " The amendment must be 
passed. In this office I have great power. 
The aiuendment must he passed. Say 
no more, but go and pass it." A jubilant 
crowd came to serenade him at the 
White House upon the event. "This is 
86 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

the king's cure," he said, " for all the 
evils. It winds the whole thing up." 
The doom of slavery was sealed, but the 
war was not over, nor the Union re- 
stored. A few days later, upon his 
return from the conference at Hamp- 
ton Roads, Lincoln again attempted a 
shorter step toward peace with univer- 
sal emancipation, in a plan presented to 
the cabinet for a subsidy to all the slave 
states upon submission to the national 
authority and ratification of the Amend- 
ment. To his open disappointment,*this 
met with no favor. It included a gen- 
eral pardon to rebellion, which few but 
Lincoln himself would have favored at 
that stage, and bore an appearance of 
purchasing the peace now soon to be 
conquered. Whatever may be thought 
of this magnanimous proposal, the evi- 

87 



/ 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

dence remains that peace and the com- 
plete extinction of slavery were alike 
the objects foremost in his mind. The 
title of Lincoln as the Emancipator rests 
no more upon the Proclamation than 
upon his fixed resolve to write univer- 
sal freedom into the Federal Constitu- 
tion on the crest of the wave of public 
sentiment, before it could recede and 
leave the Amendment stranded. 

Nothing in Abraham Lincoln's his- 
tory stands out more plainly than the 
compelling motive of his public career. 
It was antipathy to slavery. This brought 
him out of retirement, at the threat to 
enslave the Nebraska territory, and 
devoted him to the cause from which 
he was never permitted to look back. 
To no abolitionist was slavery more 
88 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

abhorrent than it was to Lincohi, not 
only for its iniquity, but because it en- 
dangered the Union. The Constitution, 
which Garrison's inspired wrath de- 
nounced in fhe fiery words of Isaiah as 
" a covenant with death and agreement 
with hell," Lincoln accepted, with all 
its obligations. The abolitionists, whose 
appeal was addressed only to the public 
conscience, had no direct and practical 
remedy for the national evil. Lincoln, 
at once a moralist, a profound and far- 
sighted politician and statesman, and a 
lover of the Union, looked for a remedy 
and saw that there could be but one. 
Slavery must be put on the way to its 
end, by means consistent with the Con- 
stitution and the Union. The first step 
was to arrest its expansion ; the next, to 
prepare the public mind for ultimate 

89 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

extinction, on the principle that a nation 
cannot endure half slave and half free. 
Thus far had he advanced when the 
power that rules over men and nations 
opened a shorter way. Every fact of 
his history points to the belief that, but 
for the intervention of secession and 
war, he would have followed with a 
national scheme of compensated aboli- 
tion. Historical monuments that cannot 
be effaced mark the line on which he 
moved from 1854 to the end of his life. 
Lincoln hated slavery. He saw and pro- 
claimed that slavery must destroy the 
Union or be itself destroyed. He was 
devoted to the Union. Slavery made 
war upon the Union. The destiny that 
charged him with the task of saving the 
Union armed him with the power to de- 
stroy slavery, and at his hand slavery 
90 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

met the fatal blow. It is idle to specu- 
late upon what he might have done. 
The world knows what he did, and it 
appears as if foreordained and inevit- 
able. 

The perspective of half a century af- 
fords a view of this great character un- 
seen by his contemporaries. Historical 
research has revealed and is still reveal- 
ing much that was unknown to them. 
Cautious and deliberate, but sublimely 
confident in himself and inflexible when 
resolved, he would brook no interfer- 
ence with his purposes. Not that he 
would take to himself the glory — noth- 
ing is more foreign to his character 
than this— but he felt that he could 
reach the end in his own way, and he 
was not sure of any other way. The 
springs of history, disturbed at their 
91 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

source by ignorant or undiscerning crit- 
icism that measured this great man by 
its own imperfect standards, will yet run 
clear. The conception of Lincoln as 
hesitating and reluctant before emanci- 
pation would be impossible if he had 
launched the Proclamation in 1861 in- 
stead of 1862. It is possible only because 
he would not be forced by public clamor 
to act before the time was ripe. To this 
single feature of his conduct, in the last 
analysis, must be ascribed the historical 
myopia that would regard Lincoln as 
willing to save slaver}^ 

They have studied Abraham Lincoln 
to little purpose who see in the supreme 
act of his life any motive less lofty than 
the act itself. To the eye of the devout, 
the hand of God was in it and the man 
divinely appointed to the work. More 
92 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

than one incident of this unique career 
suggests, with ahnost compelling force, 
the direct intervention of an overruling 
power. There is much in Lincoln's 
character that seems inscrutable. The 
occult and mystic temperament, the 
prompting voice within him, the dis- 
traught moods, the saturating melan- 
choly, the recurring dream, the premo- 
nitions of violent death, the minor key 
in which his whole life was attuned, 
relieved only by the unfailing strain of 
humor, — these are not idle tales but es- 
tablished facts. He avowed that he was 
superstitious, but he was incapable of 
hypocrisy and made no affectation of re- 
ligion. Was there a direct light, supe- 
rior to human wisdom, on the path of 
this remarkable man ? Hear him speak 
for himself: — 

93 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

"That the Ahnighty does make use 
of human agencies and directly inter- 
venes in human affairs is one of the 
plainest statements of the Bible. I have 
had so many evidences of his direction, 
so many instances when I have been 
controlled by some other power than 
my own will, that I cannot doubt that 
this power comes from above. I fre- 
quently see my way clear to a decision 
when I am conscious that I have no suffi- 
cient facts upon which to found it. . . . 
I am satisfied that when the Almighty 
wants me to do or not to do a particular 
thing, he finds a way of letting me 
know it." 

This declaration reflects a peculiar 
significance upon the words with which 
he laid the Proclamation before his offi- 
cial council. " God has decided the 
question, in favor of the slaves." 

The psychology of Abraham Lin- 
coln, with all his practical and homely 
94 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

traits preeminently a man of the spirit, 
is unexplored. It would task philosophy 
or science to fathom the depths and 
trace the conflicting currents of this 
phenomenal character. Yet of all his- 
toric personages he least can be under- 
stood without looking into his soul. A 
man of complete sincerity, the motives 
of his life are written there, and there 
they must be read. Upon the crime of 
human bondage, his soul is an open 
book. The faith that directed and sus- 
stained him in the mighty task of achiev- 
ing for his country the "new birth of 
freedom " is revealed, with Hebraic 
grandeur, in that inspired passage of his 
last address to the nation: — 

"Fondly do we hope, fervently do 
we pray, that this mighty scourge of 
war may speedily pass away. Yet if 

95 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

God wills that it continue until all the 
wealth piled by the bondsman's two 
hundred and fifty years of unrequited 
toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of 
blood drawn with the lash shall be paid 
by another drawn with the sword, as 
was said three thousand years ago so 
still it must be said, ' The judgments of 
the Lord are true and righteous alto- 
gether.' " 

Mystery and portent were over and 
about him to the end. On the morning of 
his last day, he said to the assembling 
cabinet, " Gentlemen, something serious 
is about to happen. I have had a strange 
dream, and have a presentiment such as 
I have had several times before, and al- 
ways just before some important event. 
. . . But let us proceed to business." 
The business of the day, following upon 
the collapse of the rebellion, was to 

96 



LINCOLN AND SLAVERY 

hasten the return of peace and national 
unity. With no word of triumph, but 
pardon and reconciliation on his lips, the 
travail over, the task accomplished, in 
a moment he was snatched from the 
summit of his greatness to pure and im- 
perishable fame. 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



;? 29 1913 



||llllllllllIlll!llIlllHHiraiHnmiH»«» 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




